Sponsored by the UTSA Honors College and the Center for Innovation and Technology Entrepreneurship (CITE), Peterson will speak on "Personal Insights into Successful Technology Entrepreneurship." The event is free and open to the public.

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CNN Financial News named Peterson the pioneer of the Hispanic Internet sector in the United States. He is chairman of Inter123 Corp., a $50-million investment fund focused on early-stage technology companies.

He has received national and international media attention for his accomplishments in the technology sector. Peterson is an experienced programmer who has been involved in technology development since the late 1970s. From 1989 to 1997, he worked at several Wall Street investment-banking firms. In 1997, he founded Quepasa.com, which became the first major online community for Hispanics in the United States.

After completing more than $100 million in financing including investments for Sony Corp., Telemundo and entertainer Gloria Estefan, Quepasa became in 1999 the first publicly traded online community for Hispanics to go public on NASDAQ. Peterson served as chairman and CEO of Quepasa from 1997 to 1999, and again from 2002 to 2006.

Among other ventures, he currently serves on the board of directors of Vator Inc., a Silicon Valley-based Web 2.0 community for technology ventures that is backed by Pyapal founder Peter Thiel and former MySpace CEO Richard Rosenblatt.

In the public sector, Peterson is a technology and business adviser to Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard. In Latin America, he served as a technology consultant to the federal governments of Mexico and Costa Rica. In 2003, Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano named Peterson to the board of the Arizona-Mexico Commission. He continues to address international technology issues in the border region.